About “Last of My Kind”

“Last of My Kind” exposes the anxiety surrounding social change. Isbell reaches into his own psyche as a native of rural Alabama now living in bigger cities to identify with people for whom these changes feel like more of an existential threat.

There are elements of change in place and change in time, and sometimes conflation of the two. In the refrain, the singer asks himself, “am I the last of my kind?” It’s a question of whether the world he thought he knew, and the world that created him, has been erased, and whether there’s a place for him in the world as it exists now.

What have the artists said about the song?

The people I grew up around, a lot of those folks felt like they were being left behind by time. I think things have been moving very quickly from their perspective for a long, long time, and that song is me trying to speak from maybe that eight percent of me that is still the rural Alabama man who’s looking around and wishing everything would slow down a little bit so I could raise my children in the 1940s. With progress comes a lot of fear that we just have to learn how to conquer and how to overcome. But I know a lot of people who are still stuck in that “the country’s gone to hell” feeling, and you try to remind them, “Well, what about the Civil War? You must have missed that day in history class, because there were a lot of people watching from the bleachers as soldiers shit themselves to death.” This is not our lowest point. But I guess I was trying to understand the minds of folks who feel like they don’t belong in the universal city that we sort of all wound up in.